As I pass the crowd on the lawn, I glance over my shoulder, telling myself not to look for Matthew, but still a little deflated not to see him back here. Part of me wondered if he was watching me come and go, vain thing that I am.

Whatever he thinks he feels, I’m not worthy of it. I should let him get to know me. That’ll clear it right up. I am not the paladin he seems to be.

I picture him as a grail knight, how can I help it, and damn, that’s an image. Matty Clare in full armor. Watch your step, Nina. I’m infecting the air around me with giddiness. A pebble ricochets off my toe and along the drive.

I pass the little grassy path that Hugh led me down two days ago and don’t even blush with the memory. It feels like a year has passed since that afternoon.

He feels like an entirely different person.

I think of Hugh, how he looked the night I met him, those eyes, that tuxedo, the pull I felt to him right away. And then my mind goes back even further.

I think of Michael. Professor Winthrop for the first week, “call me Michael” after that. It feels fair game to think of him now, when for so long, he was locked behind a thick mental door. The memory of him isn’t as nauseating, not in the face of today.

I walk up the drive, listening to my steps crunching, dread breathing down my neck, and I remember something Michael said the night I overstayed his office hours and he shut the door and offered me whiskey, sitting on the edge of his desk, just two work buddies having a chat.

“In my experience, students of moral philosophy arrive in two camps—the ones who think they’re good and want a nice firm pat on the back, and the ones who think they’re bad and want to know how to change. Or want an excuse not to. They count for the second category as well.” He’d swirled his chintzy tumbler and watched me drink. “I can’t figure out which one you are.”

In the blank expanse of my early twenties, it sounded like the highest of compliments—I was unique, inscrutable—but now I know he was just trying to find his angle. He had two ways to get grad students into bed, and he wasn’t yet sure which would work on me. He needn’t have agonized over it. The way was simple: notice me. Say anything to me at all, especially if it was complimentary. Make me feel more solid than shadow. I was an unwanted second child. I wasn’t good or bad. Not a killer, not really, I knew that by then, but I wasn’t a martyr either. Only lost. An easy mark.